“You’re fine, there’s nothing wrong with you, it’s all in your head,”
This statement is actually a dismissal cloaked in false reassurances and the science behind it is the subject of this post. While it is true that trauma, along with physical pain, originates in the mind and nervous system, it takes up residence in the muscles, the gut, the immune system, the cardiovascular system, and the hormonal architecture of daily life. Understanding how and why this happens can be both validating and the start of finding a different kind of care.
The Body Does Not Speak in Paragraphs
Before language, before the words “I am hurt”, your body was already responding to pain and trauma.
When something overwhelms the nervous system, especially in childhood when the brain is still developing, the experience is encoded in the part of the brain that organizes survival and is not easily changed by language or logic. The amygdala, which functions as the brain’s threat-detection center, stamps the experience with urgency and stores it as sensory and somatic (body) memory.
We now know that our brains can change through a single experience, particularly when it’s a traumatic experience. The hippocampus, which normally helps sequence events into a timeline, is disrupted under extreme stress, which is why traumatic memory is frequently fragmented and lives in our body like muscle memory.
Bessel van der Kolk*, a psychiatrist who studies the neurobiology of trauma, has documented that during traumatic recall, the brain’s language center tends to go offline. The part of you that could verbalize what happened becomes unavailable. What remains is sensation: maybe it’s a tightening in the chest, a catch in the breath, a sudden and inexplicable wave of dread. The body is speaking. It is just not speaking in a language Western culture or medicine has historically valued and been trained to hear.
When the Body Speaks for the Culture
Mental health care is still catching up to the awareness that symptoms of disease and distress are shaped in large part by culture. Each culture dictates what a person is permitted to complain about, to say, and to feel.
The common Victorian Era diagnosis of hysteria is an excellent case example. “The very roots of psychoanalysis arose from Freud’s effort to understand the most prominent culture-bound syndrome of his time, hysteria. At the time, the hysteric was the unsoothable, disenfranchised, repressed woman. She literally and metaphorically lost her voice, her ability to leave home, her sense of her own desires, and even her own mind. Instead of recognizing the unsoothability of Victorian misogyny, only a crazy woman could be seen.” (Grange Isaacson 2020)
When there is no other outlet, distress is expressed in physical symptoms that become the socially legible language for suffering. The body says what the person is not allowed to say. When the diagnosis of hysteria was eventually retired, the symptoms were reclassified and redistributed across other diagnostic categories, including what we now call depression and anxiety.
Research consistently shows that somatic presentations of depression, physical pain, fatigue, and gastrointestinal distress are more common in non-Western contexts because direct emotional expression is less culturally sanctioned. When culture, family, religion, or gendered expectation forecloses a person’s capacity to name their own distress, that distress turns inward. Over time, it becomes biological.
What Unresolved Trauma Does to the Body Over Time
The stress response system was not designed to run continuously. It’s meant to metabolize low levels of regular stress, experience peaks of stress, and obtain resourcing with regular recovery and rest. When a threat activates the body’s central stress regulator, it releases cortisol and adrenaline in response and then, once the threat has passed, returns to baseline. The problem occurs when threat perception becomes chronic.
In people who have experienced repeated early trauma, this system is chronically dysregulated. In the animated movie The Croods, a father teaches his children one rule for survival: “Never not be afraid.” For nervous systems shaped by early chronic threat, that rule becomes biology. The body never returns to baseline because the nervous system learned, very early, that there is no baseline. The long-term cost of this is systemic inflammation. Chronic stress elevates inflammatory markers in the body, and this ongoing low-grade inflammation has been linked to a significantly elevated risk of cardiovascular disease, autoimmune conditions, type 2 diabetes, chronic pain syndromes, gastrointestinal disorders, and certain cancers.
Researchers use the term allostatic load to describe the cumulative wear and tear on the body’s systems from sustained stress activation. This is the body aging faster than its years because of chronic stress.
As discussed in the last post, the ACE study tells us that adults with histories of childhood adversity carry measurably higher rates of chronic illness. One of the most concrete and underappreciated consequences of chronic stress is disruption of the autonomic nervous system’s rest-and-digest function. When the sympathetic nervous system is chronically dominant, the parasympathetic branch, the one responsible for digestion, immune regulation, sleep, repair, and the sense of safety in the body, gets suppressed. This is why so many trauma survivors struggle with chronic diseases such as irritable bowel syndrome, digestive disorders, chronic fatigue, difficulty sleeping, and immune dysregulation. The body is triaging and prioritizing survival at the expense of repair.
How Exercise Rewires Us
One of the most evidence-supported and underutilized interventions for trauma and dysregulation is physical movement. The latest research shows that moving actually cleans our brain and is a direct physiological reset for the nervous system.
Aerobic exercise, sustained cardiovascular movement like walking, running, cycling, and swimming, increases neuroplasticity and the formation of new neural connections. It also reduces cortisol over time, regulates the sleep-wake cycle, and directly counters the hyperarousal that keeps the body in a state of chronic readiness. Multiple meta-analyses show time and again that movement is the most effective treatment for depression and anxiety.
A 2023 meta-analysis published in Frontiers in Psychiatry found that resistance exercise done three to four times per week was among the most effective forms of exercise for reducing both depression and anxiety symptoms. Strength training reduces inflammatory markers and builds what one researcher described as a kind of mental fortitude rooted in the experience of choosing something hard because it is worth it.
Many people carrying unresolved trauma feel unsafe in their own bodies. They have learned to live above the neck, to distance themselves from physical sensation, or to experience movement as threatening rather than regulating. Starting small, whether that is with a ten-minute walk or a gentle resistance band, is the beginning of reclaiming the body as a safe place to live.
If you suffer from unexplained physical symptoms like chronic headaches, GI problems, fatigue, regardless of how much rest you get, illnesses that stack even if you have a healthy lifestyle, these are often signs that your body absorbed something that was too much to process and has been paying the price. The good news is that a nervous system that learned to stay alert can, with the right therapeutic relationship and consistent support, undergo neuroplasticity. Healing happens when you finally feel safe enough to live in the present. Working with a therapist who understands the relational roots of nervous system dysregulation can mean the difference between gaining insight and actual change. If you are ready to explore what that might look like, we welcome you to schedule a free consultation here ,
Coming next in the series: Post 5, “What to Do Between Sessions: Practical Tools for Healing from Trauma.”
* A recent theoretical paper ( not based on empirical data) draws on predictive coding, questions the llong held assumption that trauma is stored in the body, and reframes symptoms as outputs of maladaptive threat prediction rather than evidence of trauma physically lodged in muscles or fascia. The authors hypothesize that flow states may help trauma recovery because they increase flexibility, attentional absorption, adaptive prediction, and state shifting. Kotler, S., Mannino, M., Fox, G., & Friston, K. (2026). The body does not keep the score: Trauma, predictive coding, and the restoration of metastability. Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, 20. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnsys.2026.1812957
References
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Grange Isaacson, T. (2020). Metaphors of agony: Culture-bound syndromes of hyper-independence. Psychoanalysis, Self and Context, 15(4), 375-383.
Kleinman, A. (1988). The illness narratives: Suffering, healing, and the human condition. Basic Books.
Lam, T. P., Goldberg, D., & Dowell, A. C. (2009). Consultation for medically unexplained physical symptoms in primary care. BMC Family Practice.
Marinelli, M., et al. (2024). Resistance training and combined resistance and aerobic training as a treatment of depression and anxiety symptoms in young people: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Early Intervention in Psychiatry, 18(8), 585–598.
McEwen, B. S. (1998). Stress, adaptation, and disease: Allostasis and allostatic load. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 840, 33–44.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. Norton.
Van Der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
Friedman, D. (2022, July 7). The healing power of strength training. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/07/well/move/weight-lifting-ptsd-trauma.html